Conventional laser printers use mechanical scanners to scan a laser spot onto a photosensitive or photoconductive surface. The photosensitive or photoconductive surface may be, for example, on a drum 108. Typical laser printers have scanning optics that include a laser 102 for generating laser light, a multifaceted mirror or scanner 104 that spins at high speed for scanning laser light. A layout for a conventional laser printer 100 is shown in FIG. 1. The printing architecture shown in FIG. 1, often termed a “flying-spot” architecture, is highly effective and permits reasonably high printing speeds over relatively large printing surfaces (e.g. 8.5″×11″) with modest (1-10 mW level) laser powers.
However, the limitations of such an approach are equally evident. Scanners require a predetermined time to spin up to operating speed prior to printing a first page, and the spinning speed inherently limits how fast the scanner can scan. The mechanical nature of this scanning mechanism is thus disadvantageous and also leads to increased operating noise and maintenance costs.
Additionally, while conventional scanning optics 106 can be satisfactorily used in a wide variety of printing applications, there are emerging applications that require even higher pixel resolutions than can be provided by the architecture described above.
Accordingly, there is a need for a linear spatial light modulator that exhibits the following characteristics: good analog gray-scale capability, high modulation speed, high diffraction efficiency, and a large number of “channel” count (1000-10,000). There is a further need for a method of manufacturing such a spatial light modulator that is simple, cost-effective, and tolerant of process variations.